Jakub Hrozek and I are proud to announce the first release of pam_wrapper. This tool allows you to either simplify testing PAM modules or your application using PAM to authenticate users. PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) is a layer of abstraction on top of Unix authentication.

For testing PAM-aware applications we have written a simple PAM module called pam_matrix. If you plan to test a PAM module you can use the pamtest library we have implemented. It simplifies testing of modules. You can combine it with the cmocka unit testing framework or you can use the provided Python bindings to write tests for your module in Python.

Jakub and I have written an article for LWN.net to provide more details how to use it. You can find it here.

I’ve released a new preloadable wrapper named resolv_wrapper which can be used for nameserver redirection or DNS response faking. It can be used in testing environment to route DNS queries to a real nameserver separate from resolv.conf or fake one with simple config file. We tested it on Linux, FreeBSD and Solaris. It should work on other UNIX flavors too.

FOSDEM/Brussels, February 2nd, I gave a talk about cwrap. I announced and released version 1.0.0 of cwrap, a set of tools to create a fully isolated network environment to test client/server components on a single host.
It provides synthetic account information, hostname resolution and privilege separation support. The heart of cwrap consists of three libraries you can preload to any executable.
The libc wrapper project does not require virtualization and can be used to build environments on different operating systems. The project
consists of a socket wrapper, NSS module wrapper (users, groups, hosts), and a (s)uid wrapper with support for GNU/Linux, BSD and Solaris.

The origin of these wrappers is the Samba project, where the wrappers are in use since many years to successfully test their protocol implementations. Now it is possible to use them outside of the Samba project. The wrappers have been improved and are loaded with new features.